Mr. Bodacious

By Deborah Solomon

Published: November 16, 2003

John Currin is an American artist who cares little for American art. ''I wish I could find more to love about it,'' he recently observed, ''but it's hard. I have not seen the will to make a masterpiece in American art. What's here? Albert Bierstadt? He's small beer compared to the Europeans.''

The argument is laughable and easy to knock down. There is no shortage of American painters who have set their sights impossibly high, and heading most anyone's list might be Jackson Pollock or Andy Warhol. ''I know Warhol is a great artist,'' Currin said, ''but I don't like him. It's the kind of art that advertises that he knows the doorman at the club.''

On Thursday, a retrospective of Currin's work will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and chances are the local art scene will assess him more warmly than he assesses it. The show brings together about 45 pictures, all of them insistently and irreverently figurative. It seems likely to establish Currin as one of his generation's most esteemed painters, the fashionable art star who claims to disdain fashion, dreaming instead about the distant, bearded old masters and wondering with apparent earnestness whether he can join their league.

Currin came of age in the theory-addled, overintellectualized late 80's, when artists were walking around SoHo quoting from the writings of Jean Baudrillard and bemoaning the eclipse of the real world by ''simulacra.'' If that sounds deadly, it was, and Currin made his reputation by doing the most defiant and scandalous thing he could think of. I mean, of course, that he drew a normal human head. It had two eyes, a nose and a mouth, each in its proper anatomical place. Over time, his paintings rehabilitated all the supposedly offensive no-nos that political correctness had outlawed in art -- namely, a conservative painting style based on technical virtuosity, lewd images of women and a heightened reverence for the dead white males of European art history.

At 41, Currin is lanky with a boyish face and shaggy blond hair. In conversation, he is erudite and impassioned, and his observations tend to branch off into digressions that in turn splinter into tangents of their own. It can take him a long time to answer even the most direct question, and seldom an hour passes when he does not allude to Courbet, van Gogh, Picasso or Picabia, whom he describes as ''my four favorite artists of the past 200 years.''

When the subject turns to contemporary art, however, Currin is less expansive, perhaps because he has never warmed to the expressive possibilities of photography and video. ''In five seconds,'' he notes, ''I am bored with almost any photograph, except for pornographic ones. Part of me doesn't think that photographs are art, which I know is a reactionary attitude. But photographs all look alike to me. It's always that same slick surface.''

Asked if he considers himself the most talented artist in New York, Currin replies without hesitation: ''Of course I think that! With apologies to my friends, I always thought I was the best, even when I wasn't the best. Every artist worth his salt thinks he is the best.''

I ask him to name a living artist he considers more gifted than himself. His brow furrows, and he appears genuinely puzzled, falling into an uncharacteristic silence. ''I like Gerhard Richter,'' Currin finally says, referring to the German painter who is a generation older. ''Richter is the guy that has to be knocked off. I haven't knocked off Richter. Yet.''

What are we to make of John Currin and his baldly expressed desire for artistic supremacy? For one thing, you suspect that he would probably not make the best nurse. But great art has never sprung from pea-size egos, or even medium-size ones, and there is something riveting about the jumbo scale of Currin's ambition. In much the same way as his work revives the grand manner of the past, he seems eager to prove that the art of the last five minutes can have the same aura of opulence as a museum masterwork.

To be sure, Currin's work is hardly irony-free, and he is not a traditional figure painter sketching away as a shapely redhead holds a pose for him in a garret. Rather, he quotes extensively from existing imagery, mixing and matching styles like a proper postmodernist. Compared with older, celebrated New York figurative painters like Alex Katz and Eric Fischl, Currin doesn't try to capture a sitter's personality or the social milieu to which he or she belongs. Many of his paintings have an elegant Northern Renaissance feeling, with crisp lines, dramatic contrasts of dark and light and sinuous women who appear to have stepped out of a canvas by Lucas Cranach the Elder (think porcelain-white flesh gleaming against leathery grounds). Other pictures go in the opposite direction. They affect the dumb look of calendar pin-ups and might show scenes in which nude blondes appraise the precise size of their absurd cantaloupe-like breasts.

In the early 90's, Currin found another unlikely muse: the lonely postmenopausal woman. ''Ms. Omni'' is an unsettling portrait of a stylish 60-ish matron who looks a little desperate as she stands with her hands on her narrow hips, her clingy blue shirt revealing more than we want to see of her bra-less chest. (The painting, by the way, holds the price record for a Currin work, $650,000.)